Tuesday, August 26, 2014

The other comment I want to make concerning this
relationship between police and, let’s say, urban existence, is that you can
also see that police, the establishment of police, is absolutely inseparable
from a governmental theory and practice that is generally labeled mercantilism,
that is to say, a technique and calculation for strengthening the power of
competing European states through the development of commerce and the new vigor
given to commercial relations.- Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population

Eric Garner sold loosies.
Sold individually, priced from fifty cents to a dollar, loosies enable folks
who want to smoke but can’t afford an entire pack at once to fill their lungs. They
may also, per pack, secure to the seller a tidy profit on top of what a pack
normally goes for. Given that lots of loosie vendors are supplied with untaxed cigarettes from states like Virgina, they make a tidy profit indeed. So they’re
illegal. And so it was that cops went to
Eric Garner’s market, in part, to pick him up for selling untaxed cigarettes. He was then
murdered. We know that a black man can be killed by a cop for just about
anything—and, of course, for no reason at all—but the fact that Garner’s death
was touched off by individually-sold cigarettes struck many of us as ludicrous.
Rightfully so. Ordinary cops are rarely called upon to enforce tax laws. The US
has a host of agencies responsible for enforcing those such laws: the IRS for
income tax, US Customs and Border Protection for the taxation of trans-border
commerce, etc.Thus, even as there was something grippingly, urgently present about
Garner’s murder—the intensification of antiblack policing, the consolidation of
the New Jim Crow—there was something excessively strange about it, too, about how selling a loose, untaxed cigarette could have such consequences. Kind of anachronistic.

One might even say mercantilist.

I’ve been thinking a lot
about Eric Garner since reading Christian Parenti’s “Reading
Hamilton from the Left” today. Through a reading of Hamilton, Parenti recovers
a Founding-Dads idiom for critiquing the neoliberal withdrawal of the state
from the field of the economic. Hamilton’s work, as he puts it, “reveals the
truth that for capital, there is no ‘outside of the state.’ The state is the
necessary but not sufficient pre-condition for capitalism’s development. There
is no creative destruction, competition, innovation, and accumulation without
the ‘shadow socialism’ of the public sector and state planning.” And so the
remainder of the article is basically a listicle of the dope things Al
demanded, some of which he got: central banking, protective tariffs
(eventually), industrialization (such as it was), and so on. Unlike Thomas
Jefferson, who “feared the proletariat” (insofar as, well, he didn’t want to
see white Yankees proletarianized), Hamilton leaned into a pro-industrial, protectionist,
nationalist development model. And it would’ve worked, if it weren’t for those
meddling Jeffersonians. (Then Jacksonians. And then a war happened.)

Fine. Look, I get nostalgia
for mercantilism. Really truly. I’m writing a book about a bunch of West
Indians who wanted nothing more than the retention of the British mercantilist
policies, the very ones a putatively progressive Hamilton attempted to mimic in
‘Merica. (Indeed, Parenti’s article was basically published in every planter newspaper
across the British West Indies by 1854.) And I get that our neoliberal world is
so imaginatively depleted that one might have to look back to look forward,
Marx’s prolie poetry of the future be damned. But when I try joining Parenti in
looking back to Hamilton in order to look forward to a socialist future, all I
can see is a lot of folks getting killed for doing things like selling untaxed
cigarettes.

I think of Eric Garner, in
other words, because state-interventionist economic policies have always involved the police. Even in the
neoliberal world left behind when the welfare state cheesed it.

Indeed, the police sit at
the origin of all mercantilist policies. It’s what “police” meant. When Adam
Smith offered his lectures
on “justice, police, revenue and arms,”police
referred to forms of economic governance. As he puts it, “The [analytic] objects
of police are cheapness of commodities [and] public security and cleanliness.”
The police, in this sense, refers to the “policy of civil government,” or more
specifically “the regulation of inferior parts of government,” those that dealt
with material provisioning of the population. It was utterly conventional
usage, hardly unique to Smith. And so we get in Wealth of Nations: “The police must be as violent as that of
Hindostan or Egypt…which can in any particular employment, and for several
generations together, sink either the wages of labour or the profits of stock
below their natural rate.” Examples can be proliferated. Today lazy critics and
lazier supporters of neoliberalism tend to think of Smith as anti-state; he
wasn’t, or not in those terms. Indeed, when he uses the term “state,” he is
most frequently using it to describe a level in a stadial progression, or in
the diffuse sense of a politico-ethico-economic totality akin to the Hegelian Stadt. He almost never used “state” to
describe the machinery of governance. He did talk about police, though, and he
didn’t like what he saw.

Of course, the violence that
Smith is talking about in his complaint about EIC-ruled Hindostan has little to
do with the forms of embodied violence visited upon folk who couldn’t get with
the program; he’s talking about how laws, protections, tariffs, and bounties
shape markets. But the immaterial violence Smith laments always entailed
actual, physical violence against ordinary people in British South Asia, in
Egypt, in Britain, in New York. In a very simple way, all mercantilist programs
for development entailed the extension and intensification of the powers of the
fiscal-military
state. This isn’t an abstract conceptual thing; mercantilist policies
mobilized a lot of people who did a
lot of things, all for the state. Surveying land, counting bodies, collecting
taxes, inspecting ship bottoms. No statist development without police, because
it’s through surveillance and force that the state directs, in quite quotidian
fashion, value from one sphere to the next. The state doesn’t work through the
market, as a producer of value, so force latent or actual is what it has—all to
make the market work. Passes on market days to prevent glutting. Restrictions
on purchasing to prevent specie drains. Officers patrolling wharves to ensure
that goods aren’t being smuggled in tariff-free from non-treatied, driving
domestic prices down. High taxes on cigarettes to shape biopolitically
normalized bodies; cops making sure cheap smokes aren’t being sold singly.

To say “mercantilism” is to
say “police,” as Foucault suggests in what I’ve tagged above, and modern police
forces are one of the most vibrant vestiges of the era that liberals like Smith
hoped to call quits with. It’s not a huge leap from the forms of petty
peculation that West-India merchant and police theorist Patrick
Colquhoun attempted to interdict on the eighteenth-century Thames—theft
that both diminished private profit and state revenue—and that the NYPD
attempted to interdict on Staten Island. The gallows
at Tyburn or transportation for the former; extra-judicial murder for the
latter. (Tobacco remains a constant.)

My point, of course, isn’t
that liberal critiques of “the mercantile system” were somehow anti-police.
They weren’t, and they haven’t been. Smith’s theory of value was first
articulated in the sections of his lectures on police, and the liberal value
theory it originated basically attempted to calibrate British forms of
policing, making them adequate to what all those Scottish guys thought of as a
commercial society. We know, too, that neoliberal
economic policy in practice requires the mass policing and incarceration of
people, most of whom are of color. Indeed, the opposition between neoliberal
and statist economics is best viewed not as an abstract conflict of doctrine,
but as opposing strategies deployed by different states in different constellations
of and from different positions within the world-system. This was Friedrich
List’s point, whom Parenti wants to recover but for all the wrong reasons. (You
might get the impression, from the article, that Marx and List were somehow on
the same page. They weren’t. The latter hated the former, and was an
anti-anti-free-trader to boot.) The analytic assumption underlying all of List’s
arguments is that all markets are products of (nation-)state policy. Whether
free-market or mercantilist, whether derived from the Manchester School or
aligned with the American System, the state is right there—after all, it’s the
state that “mercantilist” or “free-trade” would grammatically predicate.
Indeed, List’s critique of Smith wasn’t that the latter was methodologically
individualistic, as Parenti suggests, but that the free-trade tenets of British
political economy were simply the form that mercantilist practices took for the
hegemon of the world-system. Free-trade Britain was just the global cop, and
they have a roster of small wars throughout the Pax Britannica to prove it.

The “state” versus
“anti-state” economic binary, in other words, is a false binary, and the
primary subject that unifies these seemingly opposed parts is the police. From
the petty smugglers hanged to prevent poorer folk from enjoying a bit of baccy
in the heyday of mercantilism, to the black bodega owner killed in part because
he sold loosies in the era of antiblack neoliberal penality, the most basic,
transhistorical, and violent agent of state economic development has been the
police.

What’s weird to me about the
Parenti article is that, ultimately, I think he gets that. As he put it in a
line I’ve already quoted: “for capital, there is no ‘outside of the state.’” But
he does so only to conclude: “Like Hamilton, we face a profound crisis rooted
in an economy that demands to be remade.” But why indeed would we
want to remake the economy at this moment, which would necessitate remaking the
state, when we might call quits with both?

This question becomes all
the sharper when we consider what we’ve seen of the state in the midst of being
“remade” over the past few weeks—the murder of Eric Garner, yes, and then the
murder of Michael Brown. It can’t be forgotten that, when the rebellion in
Ferguson set off, it was small business owners who demanded the saturation of
the area with police—small capital demanding the state to reappear in what
might have been a neoliberal, post-state paradise. And then, when a harassed
police department attempted to produce post mortem justification for the murder
of Brown, they reached about in the grab bag of mercantilist ideological
material.

Saturday, August 2, 2014

What’s the
line between appropriation and self-alienation, a consumption of another so as
to inflate oneself and a throwing of oneself to others so as to get rid of what
you are? This question, I think, haunts the short long arc of Katy Perry’s
career, and it’s one that anyone interested in anti-racist action needs to
linger with. Because Perry offers us, in however mutilated and compromised a
form, a master class on the (im)possibility of the self-abolition of whiteness.

Perry
appropriates, and does so through the invocation of terribly racist
signifiers—there’s no doubt about that. Derrick
Clifton has offered an overview of Perry’s career in racial drag, and the
globality of her racial reach is truly amazing. Black, Native American,
Japanese, Egyptian… Wherever whiteness isn’t, Perry will be, transforming
alterity into a costume to be donned as she likes.

So, an
appropriator. To be sure. But I’ve never been very comfortable with the
critical heft that the term appropriation provides, participating as it does in
a paradigm of culture that treats the latter as a kind of property—which is to
say, participating as it does in a paradigm of culture structured by
white-supremacist capitalism. Critiques of appropriation rely upon—and
performatively produce—an understanding of a racialized cultural field as a
regime of property, one populated by self-proper collectivities and regulated
by modes of navigation and behavior deemed appropriate. Within this imaginary
underwritten by the concept of property, raced forms of identification and
belonging are construed as formally equivalent to all others. Norms derive from
this conceptualization: as in all property regimes, one must recognize and
respect, not transgress upon or steal, the racial properties of others—history,
culture, language, a style or a feeling. But we know that that’s not what the
world is, that substantive inequality is the norm, that dispossession by
whiteness is the rule for darker folk, that dispossession is what racialization
is. So, the conditions of formal
equality necessary for a rule against appropriation to be in force (or
enforceable at all) are substantively undercut by the superordinate rule of
white supremacy. The efficacy of the imperative “Don’t appropriate” relies upon
a becoming-sovereign of raced subjects, but the very enunciation of the
imperative indicates the endurance of racial non-sovereignty.

There’s also the problem, evident in the Miley Cyrus debacle, that
critiques of appropriation of black cultural property tend to valorize certain
forms of blackness as proper. How many people, for instance, raised eyebrows at
Cyrus’ aspirational attachment to crunk and Southern hip hop? Lots, and with
the implicit claim that she should have chosen a more worthy objects to
emulate, appropriate, and pervert. The anti-racism (when it is anti-racism) of
Cyrus’ liberal critics is laudable, but their liberalism isn’t, and the
multiculti politics of recognition that charged their critiques quickly became
a racial policing operation—not simply of interracial interaction, but of
blackness itself, which it defines and delimits and helps turn into a stable,
proper object.If Miley Cyrus’ desired
object—something, recall, that “feels black”—was less crunk and twerk and more
Miles Davis, especially the Kind of Blue
Miles recognizable to anyone who has passed through a Starbucks ever, it’s
doubtful the outcry over appropriation would be as robust as it is. It’s
possible that people would not even recognize it as appropriation. So, in
effect, the demand that the white-supremacist culture industry recognize and
respect black cultural property becomes functional for the disciplining and
production of forms of blackness that are recognizable as respectable—a kind of
value-adding operation that in the long run facilitates more appropriation.

My final
problem with the term in relation to Perry is that charges of appropriation
tend to reconstitute the appropriator into a stable subject who could have
appropriated or not appropriated—and should not have done so. But, as Perry
herself puts it, she doesn’t really have a choice. For a white person to be a
person, to feel like a person, she has to be in proximity to blackness. Whiteness
is thrown away, albeit temporarily, in an act of self-abolition that is
necessarily an act of appropriation, because the void nullity that is and was
whiteness requires filling. Miley “want[ed]
something that feels black” because being white doesn’t feel like much;
Perry turns to racial drag because the alternative is “just
stick[ing] to baseball and hot dogs, and that's it”—that is, sticking to
nothing. We can, and should, pay critical attention to the ways in which
whiteness affectively recharges itself through fantasies of animated racial
others. But, in offering these critiques, we also shouldn’t foreclose the
possibility that these white desires for the racial other—to be the racial other—mark an attunement
to a tonality and affectivity that resonate as the inappropriable source of
even the most appropriated stars of proper black American culture. I’m talking,
of course, about the refusal to be appropriated, to become property, about the
willed and unwilled function of being property’s persistent problem, about the
radical origins of black culture, about the quotidian sounding and resounding
of the black radical tradition. I’m talking, then, about the perpetual
parabasis of whiteness, the force that interrupts it, that calls it out from
itself, and calls it to be(come) other.

I mean,
really, looking at her career, is it much of a stretch to suggest that Katy
Perry can’t stand whiteness? That her career is simply an attempt to get away
from it, even if (or especially if) her attempts ultimately “fuck [her] in the
ass,” as she put it, because she’s also, clearly, a racist? She’d rather be
some kind of alien than an ordinary white lady—a transspecies maneuver that
itself necessitates mobilizing drum and bass, dubstep, and Kanye. It’s in
“E.T.” that Perry literalizes her program of appropriation as one of
self-alienation.

But my
point here isn’t to exculpate. It’s rather to think through the imbrication of appropriation
and self-alienation, of the co-presence of taking and giving away in the field
of whiteness. Whiteness has a peculiar ontological status: it is the only thing
that can give itself away without giving anything at all because it is in fact
nothing. (Compare this to the work of people like Fred Moten and Nahum
Chandler, for whom the originary dispossession that is blackness converts into
an originary generosity, a fecundity, a giving-without-taking, an intimation of
a post-property undercommons.) If whiteness gives nothing when it gives itself
away, this giving-away always is a
taking.

As with
Perry, so with anti-racist politics. All of this stuff on Perry might be a long
way of trying to figure out how I find myself typing on a blog initially about
CLR James, how I’ve come to write through the black radical tradition, how I
have come to take part in anti-racist work at all. The intensity of the
structural collapse of white appropriation and self-alienation reaches a fever
pitch in the figure of the radical anti-racist white, the figure for whom the
abolition of whiteness is simultaneously an abolition of self. For, quite
simply, the force that incites the radical white to undo his whiteness, to give
it away, to get rid of whiteness as such—this force is never immanent to whiteness
but is always taken from its outside. A list of names and movements could
follow here, all traces of some force I’ve appropriated, incorporated into
myself as my self’s undoing. To learn to desire the undoing of whiteness is
already to be taking a lesson from the black radical tradition. Whiteness takes
even when it wants to give itself away, to get rid of itself, to get lost.

I’ve taken
this lesson from Du Bois. In one magical sentence in his biography of John Brown,
he writes, “Of all inspiration which America owes Africa, however, the greatest
by far is the score of heroic men whom the sorrows of dark children have called
to unselfish devotion and heroic self-realization…above all, John Brown.” An
“inspiration,” a “call[ing]” to “unselfish” acts, to acts that will ultimately
result in the undoing of his self, John Brown’s life, a life dedicated to the
death of whiteness, is structured by an impossible debt to Africa. To be
inspired to the abolition of whiteness entails assuming a debt to blackness
that can never be cancelled or repaid. In this sense, we might read Du Bois’
willingness to memorialize Brown’s life not as a yet another hagiography but as
a kind of debt forgiveness, an act of impossible generosity that, again, can
never be paid back. And Du Bois doesn’t demand repayment. Just more John
Browns—which is to say, more inspiration from, and more impossible debt to,
what he names “Africa.”

Again, my
point isn’t exculpation. Far from it. It’s rather to suggest that Perry’s
trajectory lays bare a structuring feature of white anti-racist politics in our
white-supremacist world, a feature whose import vastly exceeds the representational
problematics of cultural politics. Operating in a zone of indistinction—where
appropriation and self-alienation, giving-away and taking-again, collapse into
one another—white self-abolition names an impossible politics that remains,
nonetheless, the only possible politics for white folk. A pessimistic politics
that only persists through the generosity of those from whom whiteness only
ever takes.